Slashdot Mirror
Avatars Need Personal Space Too
Nicola Jones writes to alert us to a study showing that avatars need their personal space. Avatars in the virtual reality of Second Life act like real people in this way: boy avatars stand further apart than female ones, and characters tend to avert their gaze from each others' eyes when standing close together. This result holds whether the avatar is being played by a man or a woman. From the article: "The authors say this means that these online gaming environments are a goldmine of social data as well as a potential experimental research platform." Obviously not all behaviours translate from the real world to the virtual one, notes UIUC computer game researcher Dmitri Williams: "There is no research on what translates and what doesn't.... People's willingness to take risks in online worlds is radically different. Death is not permanent online."
The authors say this means that these online gaming environments are a goldmine of social data
Uh huh. I've had a lot less people ask me "R U 4 SECKS CHAT???" in real life.
Avatars in the virtual reality of Second Life act like real people in this way
Avatars act like real people in almost every way. They're extremely materialistic, cliquish, and superficial. "Playing" a game like Second Life is like hanging around with a bunch of thriteen-year-olds. The only difference is the conversation is less intelligent.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Nearly as original as putting up a DikuMUD, today.
what?!?!? that waifish female elfen thief is really a 57 year old cost accountant named Roger? I think I'll be sick first, then kill his ass!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
First of all, the granularity for moving around seems to be about 1 meter. Getting into just the right position (conversational position, you perverts! :) can be somewhat difficult. Same with facing angle... it seems to be about 10 degrees.
Trying to draw any sort of conclusions about subtle nuances of communcation seems, frankly, rediculous.
Adman
I think avatars actually act differently than the controller (player) would in a similar real world social situation.
With the internet things like chat rooms or online games shield the person from most of the social or psychological repurcussions for certain behavior. 30 year olds act like 15 year olds. Accountability goes out the window. The moral boundaries are also changed. How many people do you know that would cheat in an online game but would not cheat on an exam?
Why do they call it "Second Life" if it's for MMO people who don't even have a primary life?
/* No Comment */
How nice, glad I have never played! I think this is one of the first security breaches of an online gaming system. Usually, people try to crack the system to get more "loot" - not credit card numbers and personal information.
I guess subscribers just got a third life without knowing it (the identity thief)
Isn't that a kind of a contradiction? If death isn't permanent, it's not really a risk, is it? I find comments such as this stupid.
Oh, there's a risk alright. You'll lose all your 1337 EQZ if you don't get back to your virtual remains quick enough. (I've always wondered when someone would institute virtual insurance policies, where your junk would be saved for so many minutes from anyone getting their mitts on it before you can recover it.)
lalala jejejeje mi lykes =)
gee, i miss it so much...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I tried out Second Life for the first time today, and was sorely dissapointed. I'd read the BBC News article about it so I thought I'd see what the fuss was about.
It was really laggy, maybe my housemate was killing my bandwidth with downloading again. That made it pretty much unplayable, but the fact it crashed no less than ten times (something my computer never does) in about 30 minutes turned me right off it.
What I did observe though was a lot of confused characters running around and telling each other to "get lost" and then LOLing heartily. Reminded me of school in some small way.
It would be cool if your character could get a job in this game. Unfortunately, the game is retarded. They need a way to buy guns in the game so you can mug people.
Or better yet, just make GTA into a MMORPG.
Nick Yee, Jeremy N Bailenson, Mark Urbanek, Francis Chang, Dan Merget, The Unbearable Likeness of Being Digital: The Persistence of Nonverbal Social Norms in Online Virtual Environments.
(Given that the whole article is about a particular paper, they should have given a proper citation, or at least told us what the title of the paper was.)
My summary of their findings: on average, female characters stand closer to female characters than male characters stand to male characters. Distance between male-female pairs has larger variability than distance between same-gender pairs. This is the same as what happens in real life.
People's willingess to take risks online is about the same as their willingness to take risks elsewhere. It's just that risks online tend to be small.
Th risk of pissing off someone you 'met' 30 seconds ago is much lower than pissing off someone you work with every day. On the same token, there are plenty of people who have very bad behavior when interacting in 'the real world' with people they don't expect to see again - just hang around the customer service dept. of any retail establishment for a bit.
paintball
Tell that to my sims. Swimming to their death.. peeing themselves to their death. Killing themselves when fixing a light bulb.
Not only is Death permanent but it's humiliating.
I disagree with your conclusion that someone would cheat in an online game but not in the real world. I've been giving a lot of thought to cheating in MMORPGs lately, and have been observing behavior in Eve-Online, which is my favorite online entertainment.
I've tried to talk to players who have either "ganked" or scammed other players and I've found that even outside their role-playing they feel comfortable with unethical behavior. I've spoken to about 20 players involved in what I would consider online cheating and asked them the same sort of questions that you'd find on an ethics quiz in a personality profile. I've given the same questions to about 15 players with whom I have had "ethical" interactions.
I'm not really surprised to find that people who would not cheat or scam in real life also would not do it in an MMORPG. Maybe if I get a few minutes, I'll explore this further and write up my findings, but I'm too busy sending out email about the 55 million dollars in my dead Nigerian brother's overseas checking account.
I was serious up to the last sentence.
You are welcome on my lawn.
i wonder if the distance also varies with the player's cultural background. For example, I noticed traveling in India that the expected amount of personal distance was much less than in America. Haven't read the article, so maybe they talk about this.
Did you see that?
See what?
That avatar looked at me...
C'mon man...avatars can't 'look' at anybody...
No, man...I'm serious as a heart-attack. I swear. That big red she-male avatar over there by the elevator looked right at me!
Listen. Avatars here are on display...that's all. They have no host and no history files so they can't do ANYTHING - get it?
Ok, whatever you say, but I'm telling you, that 'no-host, no-history' cross-breed stared at me as we floated by.
Strange, it seemed just the opposite in DAoC. On almost any raid, everyone would /stick to either the raid leader or their group leader (who would /stick to the raid leader). The result - one big massive blob.
/stick formation and only spread out if they suspected a threat. The end result would be embarassing 8v150 ganks - mez, stun, AoE, AoE, AoE, 150 dead at the hands of a single group. In short, in my observation people only spread out in MMOs when there are practical reasons for doing so, such as not getting AoEd or being able to figure out which person in your group has agro from the big bad monsters. :)
The exception, of course, was in any situation where people expected to get AoEd. Then they would spread out. Don't want to get killed because you were too close to Leeeroy when he agroed the wrong mob. Even in realm vs. realm combat, most raids would travel in
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
This is true. I almost never try to infiltrate galactic death machines in real life without proper protective gear and never rely on finding all the ammo I need laying around in containers in empty rooms.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
Article: Male avatars (whether created by a man or a woman) stood further apart than female avatars, for instance, and were more likely to avert their gaze. And when an avatar gets within a few metres of another, the user reduces eye contact by moving their character to face slightly to the right or the left of the other 'person'.
Now, as a semi-regular presence in Second Life, I must say that the statements above are not necessarily true. The SL avatar's gaze follows the UI mouse pointer, and considering that the average user spends a lot of time in the UI navigating through inventory/item edit/whatnot, I think it can be said that a good portion of an avatar's gaze direction is a side-effect of the real user's actions at the time. Even if they are "moving their character to face slightly to the right or the left of the other 'person'.", their eyes don't remain fixed on one location. It's just as easy to have [the virtual-world equivalent appearance of] eye-contact with the other individual(s) as if you're facing them directly.. It's all about what you're doing with the mouse at the time.
$0.02
--Weasel
[BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY]: X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVI